On Feb 14, 2004, at 6:29 PM, Thompson, Bryan B. wrote:
> Bijan,
>
> I'm glad to hear that this is being done, but I would think that
> a Normative, rather than Informative, approach might be better
> for interoperability across SOAP and native HTTP services.
It's not informative, it's delayed :) I.e., it's not an informative
part of a Recommendation, it's a note to try to get something down with
a recommendation of future standardization.
> Unless this is an acknowledging that getting it right is not so
> easy and folks would rather be Informative than make a normative
> mistake?
Exactly. Plus an acknowleding that even with a 2 year extension, the
WSDL working group just doesn't have the resources to deal with it.
It's not like there is, to my knowledge, *any* existing practice for
this sort of description in WSDL. There is a fair bit of work at the
Semantic Web service level, especially for distinguishing "safe" (in
some sense) from world altering processes, but this isn't tied at all
to web architecture as would, in my mind, provide sufficient experience
to ground standardizatin.
So, a working group note should provide enough of a hook for the
community to hang a hat on, and a basis for future standardization.
WSDL 2.0 is strongly oriented toward extensibility. We've already
shoved a fair bit into the core spec :) The group is trying to be
careful not to include things that implementors just won't implement.
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.